Soul Destruction: Unforgivable

by Ruth Jacobs

  She opened the driver side door of her vintage 350SL. Keeping both feet on the pavement, she sat down sideways on the low seat. Then, with knees together, she lifted her legs, rotated her body ninety degrees and slipped her feet into the footwell. She believed this was the proper way for a lady to enter a sports car. Although she didn’t feel like a lady, she maintained an outward appearance that was contrary to her internal turmoil.

  Locked in, with her case and handbag on the passenger seat, she leant across to open the glove box. She took out a tatty, pink sponge meant for cleaning the windscreen. From a cavity inside the sponge, she drew out a white envelope. Sliding her hand underneath her skirt, she reached for her earnings tucked safely under the elasticated rim of her hold-ups. She counted out two-hundred pounds and put that in her purse. The remainder, she put in the white envelope, shoved the envelope back inside the sponge, and returned the sponge to its home in the glove box.

  She looked out of her window. No one was there. She checked her rear view mirror. There was no one behind. Where were the voices coming from? Sometimes she heard voices in her head, but not these ones. There was one low and one higher pitched voice. The conversation was unintelligible, but something was funny. They were laughing. Now the voices were getting louder, getting closer. A screech pierced through her. Her head twisted brusquely to the side. Her neck felt whiplashed.

  In the middle of a terrace, a young couple were kissing. The man was positioning the woman against the white-stuccoed wall of a townhouse. They didn’t seem to notice Shelley in her car. Their Friday night was happening somewhere else. Another world. A world that Shelley no longer lived in, nor did she want to. Her experience of that world had propelled her into the one she inhabited now, and though she didn’t care for her new world, she’d acclimatised to it. The emotional shutdown she’d acquired had brought her there and it left her stranded.

  Robotically, she turned the key in the ignition, switched on the headlights, put the car into drive, checked her mirrors and pulled out of the tight space. She drove towards Chelsea, where Marianne lived off the King’s Road, not far from The Lanesborough at Hyde Park Corner.

  At the first set of red traffic lights, she dipped her hand into the side pocket of the door and blindly selected a CD. The Hue and Cry - Bitter Suite album calmed her for a moment, until she began worrying about her earlier mistake. What would Marianne say if she found out Shelley called her from the hotel phone and not her mobile? At twenty-one years of age, and after nearly three years of working, she should have known better.

  2. An Alternative Reality

  In less than five minutes, Shelley arrived in Cadogan Gardens. As usual, it was hard to park. She drove alongside the gated garden in the centre of the square and past Marianne’s building before finding a space around the corner, a short walk away.

  Sitting on the low seat, she swung her legs out of the black 350SL in the same fashion she’d swung them in. With her suitcase and handbag hanging over one arm, she walked to the rear and hid the suitcase out of sight in the boot.

  Using the key fob, she activated the central locking. She heard it click but, not trusting her ears alone, she circled the car, checking the doors, windows and boot were secure with her eyes and her hands. Once she felt ready, she broke the cycle and walked around the corner to where Marianne lived – a duplex apartment on the fourth and fifth floors of an Edwardian mansion block.

  At the top of the steps of the red-bricked building, Shelley called flat six on the intercom. Marianne told her to wait outside. She thought after what happened, she would at least be invited in, but Marianne was unpredictable like that. Sometimes Shelley would be allowed inside and other times not. Marianne would say she wanted to keep her business separate from her adult son – Matt ­– though occasionally she’d instruct Shelley to deliver her cut directly to Matt, so the excuse didn’t float.

  After a few minutes, Marianne came out wearing a leopard-print nightdress that was too short for a woman in her fifties unless she was a dwarf, and Marianne wasn’t. She was closer to six-foot.

  “Have you got the money?” Marianne asked, propping the front door open with her backside. She stood directly in the glare of the security light. Her face was the sort best illuminated by candle, and not the floodlight, which was exposing every line denoting the permanent scowl Shelley suspected time had carved into her constantly sullen face.

  “He must’ve had a heart attack or something.” Shelley took four fifty-pound notes from her purse and placed them in the empty palm in front of her.

  “I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “Why do you do this? I’m not gonna believe you. You weren’t there. You didn’t see him.”

  Marianne sucked on what little remained of the super-thin cigarette she held to the centre of her mouth and the orifice morphed into an anus. “It was a crack job. What you saw wasn’t what happened. It was what the drugs saw.”

  “It wasn’t―”

  “Look at the state of you.” Marianne tossed her cigarette into the garden below. “You’re tweaking, and the amount of time it’s taken you to get here, I expect you stayed around to finish the crack.”

  “I would not have smoked crack in that room with a dead body.”

  “Stop doing that thing with your lip, it’s repulsive. You better not do that in the company of my clients.”

  Shelley walked down a step to leave then changed her mind and turned around. “I’m gonna call the hotel and report it.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Marianne said through clenched teeth. “These things happen. You were unlucky. Now you need to forget about it and move on. I don’t want to hear about this again. Is that clear?”

  “What’s to forget?” Shelley threw her hands in the air, unsteadying her balance on the narrow step. “What does it matter if I call the hotel? According to you, he’s fine.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  “Don’t I just?” Shelley muttered.

  “Call me if you’re working tomorrow. You should. It’ll get you nowhere fast making something of this, believe me.” Marianne stepped back inside the building and the door closed behind her.

  ***

  Shelley had felt a modicum of guilt for taking home two-thousand eight-hundred pounds – substantially more than the four-hundred pounds Marianne believed was her share. However, after that compassionless exchange, the guilt left her. Initially, she’d been booked for two hours at a cost of six-hundred pounds. But less than an hour into the job, the client asked if she could stay for the night and, on telling him the fee, he completed the transaction with fresh-from-the-bank fifty-pound notes. She was supposed to give the madam a third of what she earned, but there was no doubt Marianne was undeserving. The crisp fifties were in their rightful place – her sponge.

  Under the light rain, Shelley skulked back to her car. Considering the consequences of maintaining a miserable expression, she exercised her facial muscles with repetitions of smiles. Though awkward with a twitching upper lip, she didn’t want her sadness engraved on her face as Marianne’s bitterness had been marked on hers.

  She set off homeward bound with the waxwork face revolving in her head. She wondered if anyone would have found him yet. No, it wouldn’t be possible. The room was booked at least for the night. He may have booked it for days, if not a week or more, if he was staying in town. No one would know. The cleaner maybe. No, the sign for room cleaning wouldn’t be on the door. Could she remember if it was? No, but it wouldn’t be. Men don’t engage hookers overnight and leave that sign out.

  If she didn’t alert the hotel, he could be there dead and alone for days. Who would be missing him? A family, if he had one. He probably did. If he was in London for business, there might be associates trying to reach him. Someone would miss him and report him. If not, the cleaner would find him. Oh, the poor cleaner! Perhaps she should stop at a payphone and make the call.

  He wasn’t a bad client and thankfully, he didn’t have any strange requests. She
despised some of her clients for their sick rhetoric, as well as the things they wanted her to say. As a call girl, she could refuse, and a few times in the past, she had done so, but when she was forced, there was little she could do. At five-foot and six-inches tall, and not quite eight stone, she wasn’t a good match for the average-sized man.

  It was a shame one of those sick perverts hadn’t died on her. One of the clients who’d raped her or one who’d beaten her. The men that had done that to her gave the impression they didn’t see anything wrong in their actions – flinging money at her after, or forcing her hands open to take it as she cried. As if that could justify their actions.

  Shelley was used to Marianne’s routine, the hard sell of an alternative reality. And when it didn’t work, which it never did with Shelley, the advice that followed was always the same – forget about it and move on.

  She’d been through that rigmarole after she was raped by the first client Marianne sent to her flat and again, when she was beaten by a film producer in his waterfront penthouse in Battersea. The film producer had said he thought she was acting – acting a part that he wanted. She was screaming, running from him, trying to get away. She was covered in blood, crying for him to stop, begging him to stop. He knew that wasn’t an act. The scarring from that night ran deeper than the external welts and bruises that had pained her for weeks before they eventually healed. And those visible marks had faded rapidly, in contrast to what she knew was yet another eternal mar left on her psyche.

  In total, there had been four attacks while she was working that could have been reported to the police, but none were declared. Although she would always get herself checked at the Praed Street Project, she would tell them as little as possible. What could they do? And as for the police – it was nonsensical talking to them. They would never believe a hooker over a wealthy professional or businessman. She wouldn’t have told them what she did for a living, but after digging around – and she feared that’s what would happen – they would realise she couldn’t account for her standard of living: her flat in Hampstead, her car, her clothes. Although little money went in and out of her conventional bank and building society accounts, if there was ever a reason to search her flat, they’d surely find the cash that she kept hidden in her kitchen, inside the cold bank.

  However much she wanted the justice that had eluded her, her experience proved it wasn’t worth the risk. In Shelley’s case, getting justice was as likely to happen as another chance to let her brother win a game of pool.

  3. The Stranger, the Coke Can and the Futuristic Street Installation

  Shelley found herself squatting on the dirty floor of a public toilet in Camden Town, trying to avoid the sparkling streams of urine under the dim light. Twenty minutes earlier, she’d plucked a young man from the street. He’d been sitting on the pavement by the Tube station, begging, appearing to be homeless. She had a knack for picking them – the junkies – and she was rarely wrong.

  She entrusted him with one-hundred and twenty pounds to score sixty brown and sixty white. He both scored and brought back the drugs – the latter not being a given when strangers score for strangers, especially when buying heroin and crack. With that action, sadly, he proved more reliable and perhaps more deserving of her trust than the majority of people with whom she associated.

  Although in her cigarette packet she still had the crack from The Lanesborough, she needed more. And she needed the heroin to come down, but before coming down, she wanted to get as high as she knew how. Speedballing. The superlative combination of heroin and crack. The transportation to Shangri-la.

  None of her friends took heroin. The only two heroin dealers she knew – Jay and Ajay – weren’t answering their phones. That was why she had to follow her usual Plan B, which she imagined was no more jeopardous than working.

  The stranger had suggested shooting up in the toilet on Inverness Street. She didn’t want to wait to walk back to her car so had accompanied him inside the futuristic street installation. Though the outside was modern, inside it was rank. One of the worst public conveniences Shelley had ever used for a hit. The stench of stale urine permeated every cell in the depths of her nasal cavities and from there, travelled down her throat like post-nasal drip. Even though she kept her mouth shut, she could taste it on her tongue. It was making her gag.

  The spoon he cooked up in wasn’t a spoon at all. Neither of them had one, so he used the bottom of a coke can as a substitute. Shelley hoped the boiling would sterilise the metal. She would have preferred her own clean spoon, but it was in her glove box.

  She wondered if that was everything he owned, bundled into the small rucksack on his back. She didn’t ask. She didn’t say anything. And neither did he. Why was she dressed for the office when she was shooting up in a public toilet? Not that it would have been difficult to conjure an alternative to what happened at The Lanesborough, but she wasn’t there for conversation. She was there to forget. In her own way. Not by the falsehoods Marianne tried to peddle.

  She rolled up her sleeves to choose a vein. Her arms were clean. So far, she’d managed to evade the track marks, lumps, scabs, bruises and abscesses that would have been tantamount to commercial suicide. To charge upwards of two-hundred and fifty pounds an hour, her clients could never know she was an injector. So injecting had to be organised, alternating numerous veins in her arms, hands, legs and feet. If she was messy, she’d only be able to solicit clients on the street, and streetwalking came with far more risk and a far lower financial reward.

  When the heroin had dissolved, she added a rock of crack. With the young man holding the can steady, she used the plunger end of her syringe to grind the white stone into the brown water. She hurried, craving to feel the warm safe-danger, her body pulsating, and her head pumping like it was pumping out every tormenting memory it stored. Soon, the relentless playback of those pictures and scenes would stop. She would have her reprieve. Her respite. And although earning the money to pay for it created new images, as abhorrent as they were, what she was originally escaping from was worse.

  Shelley proffered her gold twenty-pack. He took a cigarette and, using his teeth, tore off a chunk of filter. He snatched it from his mouth with his thumb and index finger then dropped it into the concoction. Shelley noticed the scabs on his lips and the dirt under his fingernails. The filter wasn’t clean. She needed the hit.

  “You first.” A gentleman, he held the can out in front of Shelley, letting her draw up her shot before him.

  “Pass it here.” Shelley positioned her filled syringe between her teeth and reached for the can to reciprocate.

  Once his barrel was full, she delicately placed the empty can on what seemed like a dry area of the floor, saving the filter for the next fix. If she was taking one hit from the dirty filter, what difference would a second make?

  She wrapped one hand around her wrist. She squeezed. On cue, her pulse thumped and the map of blue veins rose from the back of her hand. She let go, swiped the syringe from her mouth, removed the orange cap with her teeth and inserted the needle into a sinking vein at the base of her hand. Pulling back on the plunger, blood swirled into her medicine. Inside, her rush was brewing. She pushed it all in.

  4. Damaged Goods

  On Saturday, Shelley roused mid-afternoon. She didn’t remember driving back from Camden, so it was a relief to find herself in her own flat on Willoughby Road and not in some strange bed or worse, in her working flat. That flat in Belsize Park wasn’t meant for sleeping in but after a binge, sometimes she’d wake there and find money she couldn’t account for, meaning she’d had clients that she didn’t remember seeing. Other times, she’d find a junky she must’ve brought back from the streets. Though often in need of a wash, a smackhead stranger was more welcome than inexplicable earnings.

  From her handbag, she took the white envelope. She recounted her pay from The Lanesborough job and bound the crisp fifties in pairs – one note flat with the Queen’s head upright, the other folded ove
r it with the Queen’s head on its side.

  She hid the cash in the cold bank – a Black Forest gateau box kept in the freezer. For disguise, it was resealed every time it was reopened and stashed amid a plethora of frozen food.

  In the bedroom, she wrapped herself in an old duvet. Still in her pyjamas and barefoot, she waddled on the oak floorboards through to the lounge. She switched on the satellite box and her recently acquired Bang & Olufsen television.

  Nestled on the claret, velvet sofa, she shot some junk to counter the aching in her bones. The demon inside that drove and controlled her faded, and she settled into the reprieve she’d created.

  She did not have a husband of nine years who secretly fathered a child with his cousin. She did not have a pimp who forced her to work in downtown LA and took all her money. She was not begging her woman-beating boyfriend to come back and take care of her and their five children.

  No.

  The warm blanket of heroin had slackened and in her half-sleep, she’d mistaken the arguments on television for her own. The Jerry Springer show was rubbish, but even armed with this knowledge, she sat up to concentrate. Occasionally, there was an American trailer park resident who made her feel less pathetic about her own life.

  ***

  By the time Shelley changed into jeans and a jumper, the effects of her medicine had dissipated. Back in reality, she knew that if she was going to call The Lanesborough, it would have to be done when she went out tonight. If not, it would most likely be too late, and if it wasn‘t already, it wasn‘t right for a dead body to be alone in that hotel room.

  Her internal board of directors marked the onset of agitation, issuing a shrill warning with their trumpeting. Within seconds, they charged to the front of her mind with fear: she hadn’t wiped her fingerprints from the taps in the bathroom.